A review of the airport’s disastrous “ground stop” will stay secret, says the GTAA. CEO Howard Eng will return Thursday — more than 48 hours after the crisis began.

Toronto’s airport authority says it will keep secret the results of a review of this week’s Pearson International Airport shutdown, as its chief executive officer remained silent for the second consecutive day of the crisis.

Howard Eng, CEO of the Greater Toronto Airports Authority, will return to Toronto Thursday — one day early from an unspecified business trip, but more than 48 hours after operations at Pearson ground to a halt, stranding thousands of travellers and forcing days-long delays.

The authority will be reviewing its decision to declare a “ground stop” early Tuesday, which banned all landings of North American flights for more than eight hours. It reviews every extreme weather event that affects the airport, but keeps the results of those reviews secret.

“We never have (made them public), and they are for internal purposes,” said Scott Armstrong, spokesperson for the GTAA, who refused to explain why the reviews are kept secret. “It’s a corporate decision.”

Thousands of weary passengers remained stranded in Toronto Wednesday, trudging forward in long lines to rebook cancelled flights. Hotels have booked up quickly, and many have resorted to sleeping on the airport floor.

Meanwhile, Eng has been in Edmonton. Armstrong said the CEO was on a business trip, but refused to tell the Star how long he had been there, what sort of business he was doing or why he was unavailable for an interview until Thursday.

The Star was earlier told Eng was out of the country. There are no aviation conferences scheduled in Edmonton this week, but the Edmonton Regional Airport Authority said it had a meeting with Eng on Thursday evening, which has now probably been rescheduled.

Eng, CEO of the GTAA since 2012, was born in Hong Kong but moved to Edmonton when he was 11 and later attended the University of Alberta. He worked for the Edmonton airport authority and helped launch and run the new world hub.

His daughter, parents and father-in-law still live in Edmonton. A woman who identified herself as Eng’s mother on the phone said she was expecting her son to visit her this week.

The authority is facing tough questions about its decision to call the ground stop — which it says it made in consultation with airlines and NAV Canada, which runs Canada’s civil air navigation system — at 2 a.m. Tuesday. It was lifted at 10 a.m.

A ground stop or “ground hold” means that all arriving flights are banned. The GTAA has said that a sudden cold snap of -25C temperatures and -40C wind chills made it unsafe for ground crews to taxi planes to gates. As more delayed planes filled up the tarmac, no additional North American flights could land.

The shutdown affected 22,000 people flying on WestJet alone. On Wednesday, almost a third of scheduled flights arriving at Pearson were cancelled, 243 in total. One quarter of departures — 188 scheduled flights — were also cancelled.

The blast of frigid weather has affected flight schedules across the continent, with more than 1,000 flights cancelled at Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport and hundreds more canceled in Detroit, Cleveland and Newark.

But an O’Hare spokesperson said that despite record-low -40C wind chills on Monday, the airport did not have to declare a ground stop. JFK International, La Guardia and Newark Liberty International airports also remained operational during the bitter cold.

Toronto must take notes from other airports and prepare better for extreme cold next time, said Karl Moore, an aviation expert and McGill professor.

“When you look at places like Regina and Winnipeg, you just dress for it. You would think: what do they do in Siberia? What do they do in the Northwest Territories?” he asked.

“This is unusually cold for Toronto ... They’re not ready for it. But I would blame them if they don’t learn from it.”

Crews working at airports in Regina and Winnipeg would be more experienced and better prepared for the cold, but they don’t have to be outside for as long because the airports are less busy, Moore said.

Further, when delays due to cold weather occur, there is more time for a smaller airport to recover because there aren’t as many planes taking off and landing in such a short span of time, he added.

But he said the GTAA should tell the public what it learns from this incident — by releasing the results of its internal review.

“In a case like this, where it’s had such a big impact, I think it would be good public relations,” he said. “It would give people in Toronto, and indeed across the country, a greater sense of confidence in them.”

Peter Fitzpatrick, a spokesperson for Air Canada, said the airline did bring in extra staff and take precautions with equipment ahead of Tuesday’s extreme cold. But the deep freeze happened too suddenly, he said.

“The weather event in Toronto was quite unprecedented, in terms of the freezing ice that quickly built up all over the airport. Every carrier was affected and it just made it hard to operate,” he said.

Ground crews were at risk of hypothermia and frostbite, and the ramps became so icy they were “like a skating rink,” said WestJet spokesperson Robert Palmer.

He added that some equipment does not work in the extreme cold, including baggage conveyer belts and tugs that pull the baggage carts. All of these elements combined to slow down operations, he said.

Since Monday night, WestJet has cancelled 192 flights, affecting 22,000 people — nearly half of its regular daily schedule. The airline has chartered a Boeing 757 to help clear the backlog, but Palmer expects the delays to last a few days yet.

“We really want to express our thanks to our guests for their patience,” he said. “This has been a very poor experience for them, and we apologize.”

With files from Joel Eastwood

RICK MADONIK / TORONTO STAR
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Greater Toronto Airports Authority CEO Howard Eng remained incommunicado on Wednesday as airport delays continued to make travel difficult for thousands of passengers long after Pearson called a controversial "ground halt" for eight hours.

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